Note: The
published version of this paper is in Social History, v. 21 no. 2 (May
1996) pp. 142-59. This pre-publication draft is freely available from www.galbithink.org/fw.htm

Through Eyes in the Storm

Aspects of the Personal History of

Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution

Douglas A. Galbi

Research Associate

Centre for History and Economics

King's College, Cambridge CB2 1ST

23 April 1994

Revised, 4 November 1995

Abstract

Women's experience of child
labour in factories in early nineteenth century England may have increased
their psychological susceptibility, both in life-cycle and social-historical
trajectories, to non-wage earning roles as mothers. This paper uses as a
primary source an official examination into the punishment of a ten-year old
female factory worker. From this text arises an interrelated collection of
stories – the story of that girl and her mother in a psychological and
relational struggle under the circumstances of their lives, an alternative
story of how other girls coped, and an account of how these personal dynamics
fit into the broader social history of women in nineteenth century
England. This history offers important insights into the effect of deprivation
and brutality on the development of gender.

The actions, motivations and psychology of working
class females are often pushed to the side in accounts of the construction of
gender in early nineteenth century England.* One
such account directs attention to the interests of men in confining women to
the home, to men's organizational advantages, and to the role of men's unions
in advocating women's roles within the home.[1] Another account looks at how notions
of skilled labour and family headship were linked and generalized to all
working class men, thus making women into illusory dependents.[2] Accounts of the struggle for
political representation describe how the language of radical political culture
and its organizational practice situated men as political actors and left women
in the domestic circle.[3] While such accounts are useful for understanding how non-wage
labor in one's own home became an idealized role for women, women in their
appended positions lack psychological depth, and their positions and actions
are interpreted in terms of the categories of others -- male workers, the
middle class, or the male tradition of labour history.[4] Thus we see the straining argument
that Chartist women's acceptance of domesticity was a 'rhetorical gesture to
answer vitriolic attacks on their activities from the middle class press' and
that Chartist women developed a 'militant domesticity' that defined a mother's
responsibilities 'not just as nurturing children in the home, but laboring to
feed them and organizing to better their lives'.[5]

Substantial historical evidence about how working class women themselves worked
through ideas of gender in early nineteenth century England is difficult to
find. Understanding language as a constitutive element of personal
perceptions implies that analysis of discourse can probe workers'
self-understandings. One scholar has recently taken this linguistic turn
into nineteenth century Lancashire. He noted in the course of seeking
adult male workers' perceptions of the social order:

The search for what was present must,
however, be acknowledged as exceedingly difficult; given the amount of research
on the labour history of the period it is surprising how impressionistic are
accounts of these perceptions.[6]

The problem with respect to women workers is even
greater, for one cannot assume that the dominant discourse is their
discourse. According to another scholar, in contrast to the 'universality
and moralism of masculinist discourse on women's work', women workers
testifying before the Factory Commission of 1833 presented 'concrete realities
of their lives' and 'a rich discourse on the complexity of working women's
experience'.[7] This is an important observation, but it was made only in
passing on to the discourse of male legislators, male unionists, and male
spinners. The search for working women's autobiographies from the early
nineteenth century has also largely failed to find material that could provide
a window on the perceptions of working class women as active, complex subjects.[8] One goal of this paper is to
present, interpret, and weave into history such material.

In Wigan in 1833 a factory commissioner examined Ellen Hootton, a 10 year old
girl; Mary Hootton, her mother; and two men.[9] I will use the evidence from this
examination to construct an economic history and psychological analysis of
Ellen's relationship with her mother. I will also use the evidence to
explore how other girls in the factory, who were not like Ellen, perceived
Ellen. Then I will draw upon the story of Ellen and the story of the
girls who were not like Ellen to suggest that females' experience of child labour
may have played an important role in shaping their response to the ideal of
women as nurturing mothers and non-wage workers in the home, an ideal that
gained currency in working class England toward the mid-nineteenth
century. This history, while based on an empathetic reading of the
limited available evidence, offers at least a dramatic argument for considering
the psychological effects of child labour on human and social development.[10]

* * *

Mary Hootton, Ellen's mother, was born in 1793 in Wigan and worked as a weaver
there. The cross currents of the Industrial Revolution flowed strongly
through her time, place, and occupation. In the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries Wigan, under firm guild control, was a centre of
brass and copper foundries and was second only to London for pewter
manufacturing. After 1740, the non-ferrous metal industries declined
sharply along with other small workshop industries. Coal and cotton grew
up to form the new core of the Wigan economy.[11]

From the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century the coal and
cotton industries in Wigan were transformed from cottage industries to
industries with numerous large firms. In the mid-eighteenth century, work
groups in both industries were small, and they were typically organized around
the family with the women and children working with the men.[12] The growing demand for coal in the Northwest in the late
eighteenth century stimulated an expansion of coal mining. In the 1770s a
canal linked Wigan to Liverpool, and private rail lines were put down to
connect to the canal. These developments, along with advances in mining
technology, were associated with growth in the number and average size of
mines, and with the development of a coal mining labour force and labour market
detached from the family.[13]

The transition from cottage industry to large-scale enterprise was more painful
in the cotton industry. The expansion of factory spinning of cotton in the last
decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth
stimulated the demand for handloom weavers. In 1799 an observer in Wigan
noted, 'the demand for manufactured goods is great, and were it possible to
make one weaver into two they might be employed'.[14] However, after about 1820 the
expansion of factory-based power weaving led to a steady deterioration in
handloom weavers' earnings and to the eventual and painful elimination of their
occupation.[15]

The lives of Ellen and Mary Hootton were caught up in the handloom weavers'
deteriorating position. Ellen, Mary's daughter, was born out of wedlock
in 1822 or 1823. Her father, like Mary, was a weaver. Under an
order placed on the father, Mary received 1s.6d. a week for child support until
Ellen was four years old. She then received 1s. a week until Ellen was
seven and a half, at which time payments stopped. These reductions may
relate to the father's worsening economic position: 1826 and 1829 were
particularly difficult years for weavers, with piece rates plummeting 33% and
29% respectively.[16] Mary, who was also a weaver, also experienced the same blows,
and soon after support payments stopped Mary sent Ellen into a factory.
According to Ellen, she began working in the factory when she 'wasn't quite
eight', while her mother, perhaps with some awareness of the Factory Act of
1819, said that Ellen began work 'close upon nine years old'.[17]

We know that about 1831 Mary Hootton was earning 5s. a week. Mary worked
on a dandy-loom in a dandy-loom shed, a type of work that represented an
opportunity to earn higher wages than on an ordinary hand-loom in exchange for
regular hours and close supervision.[18] Mary's earnings in the dandy-loom
shed were about equal to those for handloom weavers at the time.[19] Thus while Mary may have been more ambitious than other weavers
in seeking to enhance her earnings, she apparently suffered from other relative
disadvantages.[20]

Mary’s earnings did not leave much room for survival. The cost of twelve
pounds of oatmeal was about 1s.10d.[21] Rent and taxes for a single spinner
in Wigan were 1s.6d., while fuel, soap, and candles amounted to 1s.2d.[22] Moreover, in the course of her personal problems that developed
over the next two years, Mary's earnings fell from 5s. a week to 3s. a
week. Nonetheless, she was not able to get any support from the parish
because of her earnings.

The potential earnings of Ellen, the nine year old daughter, were very
significant relative to those of Mary, her forty-one year old mother.[23] As her mother noted with apparent dismay, during Ellen's first
twenty weeks in the factory she had to be 'taught' the work and was not
paid. After her learning period, her earnings began at 10 1/2d. a week
for working half of a side of a spinning machine. They rose as she took
on more work: 1s.9d. a week for a side, and 2s 7 1/2d. for a side and a
half. If she had been able to take on two sides, as other girls did, she
could have earned 3s. 6d. a week. This amount was more than her mother
earned per week in 1833.

Figure 1

While Ellen's potential earnings were relatively high, her conditions of work
were horrendous. On weekdays she began work in the factory at 5:30 a.m.
and finished at 8 p.m. Included in this period were a thirty-five minute
break for breakfast and a fifty-five minute break for dinner. On Saturday
she worked about another nine hours. The factory in which she worked was
relatively small, and the evidence suggests that it had poor quality machinery.[24] Figure 1 shows a drawing of the spinning machine with its
columns of bars and threads.[25] Ellen stood in front of this machine, like a
prisoner looking through cell bars, and tied up any of the threads that broke.
She had trouble with this task and complained to her mother that she 'couldn't
keep her ends up'.

Ellen refused to identify with her role as a wage earner in the factory and
sought to escape or subvert it. She said that her mother put her to work
in the factory, that her mother 'gets' her wages, and when asked how long she
had been in the factory she said she didn't remember, but 'my mother will know
how long I worked better than I'. Ellen did not show pride in her ability
to provide her mother with earnings comparable to her mother's own earnings.[26] On the contrary, many times she tried to run away from the
factory.[27] One time she was missing for a whole day, and she did not come
home until nine o'clock at night. Another time she stole 6 1/2d. from a
box that her mother had left open at home. Her mother complained, 'It was
all I had to make my breakfast on, and I was forced to borrow'. Ellen's mother
also recounted that Ellen stole a brass box and about 10d. from Betty Chapman,
another worker in the factory. Ellen herself denied stealing
anything. Ellen's mother was not able to get the money back from Ellen
and instead had to repay Betty Chapman out of money from Ellen's wages.
Ellen's capacity for defiance shows in her response to the examiner's
brow-beating inquiries:

How came you to tell me in the morning you
never stole any thing; what made you tell me such a lie, when I told you to
tell the truth? --(After a long pause.) -- What have you got to say (No
answer.) -- Whose brass box was it you stole; what was her name? -- (A
long pause, and the question repeated twenty or thirty times.) -- Betty
Chapman's.

Mary was angry and frustrated with her daughter Ellen's behaviour. She
repeatedly called Ellen 'stupid'. She said that Ellen was 'a very naughty
stupid girl', that 'she was very stupid, and wouldn't heed when she was spoken
to'. Mary said that she beat Ellen many times and that Ellen deserved
punishment from the overlooker. In the instances when Ellen ran away from
the mill, Mary brought her back and put her back to work.

Mary was not a sadist, not even merely a struggling, unfeeling parent.
Ellen was her only child.[28] She cried when two outsiders came to inquire
about how Ellen was treated. This was not just a grief generated by
exposure to others; Mary said that other inquirers didn't see her cry, but 'I
cries many a time'. Ellen's behaviour also indicates that Ellen sensed
that her mother had an emotional commitment to her. Ellen cried to Mary
about her punishment in the mill. One morning when Ellen was afraid that
she was going to be punished, she begged her mother, who had taken her to work,
to stay with her at work. Yet when the examiner asked Ellen if she had
been hurt when the overlooker beat her, she replied without emotion, 'No; but
it made my head sore with his hands'. The evidence suggests that Mary
both loved Ellen and desperately wanted her to earn money as a good worker in
the factory.[29]

The strain of this conjuncture had an important effect on Mary's perceptions of
her weaknesses and needs. Consider the following exchange between Ellen
and the examiner.

Were you ever in a church in your life --
No.

Do you ever say your prayers? -- Yes

Who to? -- My mother.

What do you say? -- Our father, &c.

[Comment: Here the child repeated the
Lord's Prayer, but not correctly.]

Do you ever say any other prayer? -- No.

How often do you say that? -- Every night.

Apparently every night Ellen, who had never been in a
church, said the 'Our Father...' to her mother Mary. When asked whether
her father was dead, Ellen said, 'I have no father'. Her father was
alive, but he was not married to her mother, did not live with her mother, and
no longer contributed to his daughter's support. Yet a heavenly Father
whose will would be done, who would give daily bread and deliver Ellen from
evil, would give Mary much more space to love Ellen. Part of Mary's
burden in her relationship with her daughter was the burden of enforcing the
laws of survival. Because she loved her daughter, she seems to have been
seeking a way to gain more freedom to express that love.

But, among other things, Ellen was not able to recite the prayer
correctly. Mary tried to get the overlooker to discipline her
daughter: '...I asked him to tutor her as he would his own, as she
wouldn't heed me'. Mary was so frustrated that love and money no longer
mattered. According to the overlooker:

Her mother has told me to take her to
myself, and have her earnings, and keep her on bread and water, and put a lock
of straw in one corner of the room for her to lie on.

When the examiner recalled Mary for further
questioning, he asked her:

Did you ever tell him [the overlooker] to
take her, and that he might have her earnings, and to give her bread and water,
and a lock of straw to lie on?

She responded:

I told him to take her, and he might have
her earnings, and let her lie in one corner of his room all night, to frighten
her. I never said a lock of straw.

This is an extraordinary response. Imagine the
examiner's eyes growing bigger and a look of horror appearing on his face as
the mother apparently confirmed the wild claim that the overlooker made.
She, perhaps sensing the examiner's judgement of her, then appended an
explanation and denied a detail: '...to frighten her. I never said a lock
of straw'.

While Mary construed the overlooker as a father figure, the overlooker himself
presented his relationship with Mary and Ellen as being largely impersonal and
procedural. He had hired Ellen to do work. When asked why he beat
Ellen, he explained that her 'parents' had told him to do so. When asked
if he knew Ellen's father, he said no and clarified that his reference to
Ellen's parents meant her mother. When asked what 'sort of woman' is
Ellen's mother, he responded that he didn't know, for he had 'very little to do
with her'. He then went on to offer some vague gossip about her -- 'What
folk tell me is, that she is very idle,
and a bad-behaved woman too'. The overlooker in his personal capacity seems even farther away than
Heaven as a place to look for a father for Ellen. But the overlooker was
very close to Mary as a figure of economic law. He governed the rules of
who, how, and how much for child wage earners. These are rules that Mary
desparately needed Ellen to follow.

Ellen was a 'bad' girl. She refused to accept the rules that other
factory girls followed. How did 'good' girls think and behave? A
recent study of nineteenth-century working class autobiographies argued:

Not unnaturally, the small child felt very
proud of his capacity to contribute to the family income.... Two
important consequences flowed from the way in which the young child labourers
assessed the value of their work. In the first instance, the financial
interdependence of the members of the family economy and the way this was known
and accepted by children as young as seven or eight, was clearly a force which
bound together, emotionally as well as materially, the family as a
whole.... The second consequence was that as long as they received some
support from their family economy in return for their financial contribution,
the children were capable of containing their suffering within the framework of
the values of security and dependence which we have been examining.[30]

This is an account of a good child. It is also
an account of a male child relating to a generalized family.[31] To address the issues of this paper, we need to consider
differences between girls and boys.

Such differences may not matter. In Gentleman's Magazine of 1795 a
middle-class observer presented a laudatory account of a girl's work in a coal
mine a few miles away from Wigan.[32] In
the 1780s the girl's father, a coal miner, took his nine year old daughter to
work in the mine. There she worked underground, dragging coal from the
hewers to the surface, and earned, along with her seven year old brother, seven
shillings a week for their parents. Her father was subsequently killed in
an accident in the mine, and her mother, who worked in the home, went insane
with grief. But the girl supported her mother and her little brothers
with her work; at age fifteen she brought home 3s. 6d. a day by working a
double shift underground. The girl's actions suggest trans-gender
identification and substitution; the girl took her father's place as a
worker. The story preserved conventional understandings of family for its
readers, while presenting a simple substitution at a suitable class distance.

A deeper analysis of daughters' wage work in early nineteenth century England
suggests that its primary significance was neither in subjection to the father
nor in emulation of him. A mother's legal claim to her daughter was subordinate
to the father's, but a daughter seemed to have been more hers than his in an
emotional and relational sense.[33] This probably meant that when the father did
not work immediately with the girl, the mother was responsible for putting the
girl to work and collecting her wages. The examiners' questions and the
witnesses' testimony in the factory investigations of 1833 generally address
children's parents in terms of the undifferentiated category 'parents', but
when specific circumstances are addressed, mothers come to the fore more often
than fathers.[34] One witness noted that parents sometimes borrowed money against
their children's earnings: 'One woman had let out both her children for 10s.,
and another had sold hers for a year, but for what sum she did not mention'.[35] A seventeen year old girl working in Manchester noted with a
tone of resentment that her mother receives her wages: 'always has had 'em; has
'em now'.[36] A worker in a mill working at night explained that it was
difficult to stay awake at night; he and a girl working under him sometimes
fell asleep, and one would wake the other up. One time after the girl had
fallen asleep, he called to her and she cried out, confused, 'Mother, it's not
time to go to the factory yet'.[37]

A girl's labour was a central part of her understanding of herself and of her relationship
with her mother.[38] 'I hope I never shall get tired of work. My mother always
brought me up to be a good worker', said a twelve year old girl working in a
brickyard in Staffordshire in the middle of the nineteenth century.[39] A woman who had worked about thirty years in factories, who as a
girl had wanted to leave home to work as a domestic servant but had gone to
work in a factory because 'my mother was ill, and I was obliged to be at home',
explained that 'good children come from good mothers'.[40] In contrast to the fleeting glimpse
we see of her childhood preference to work as a servant, she told the
interviewer, 'I have noticed, in my own neighbourhood, that young women brought
up in factories, against those that are brought up as servants, seem to take
more care of their houses and children, and to be more industrious, than the
other class....'[41] An eight year old girl trading watercress on a street in London
two decades later presented herself as 'a worker, a good and helpful little
girl, a source of income'.[42] Her story of herself was an account of her work,
and in this story her mother was a central figure; her father -- a silent one.[43] Good little girls were wage earners who identified with their
mothers, who responded to their mothers and sought to please them.[44]

How did the other girls in the factory view Ellen? We know that Ellen
worked in a spinning room with about twenty-five workers, all under the
supervision of one overlooker. Of these workers, at most three were women
over age eighteen, about ten were children between twelve and eighteen, and the
rest were children under twelve. More than half the children were
probably girls.[45] The examiner did not question any of Ellen's co-workers.
Nonetheless, important insights follow from recognizing that they formed the
audience for a strange punishment that the overlooker imposed on Ellen.

The early English factories were the scene of considerable brutality. One
fearsome tool of abuse was a wooden rod two or three yards long, about an inch
and a half in diameter, with an iron pike at the end. It was a roller
taken off the top of a machine for preparing cotton. As punishment
children got their heads hit with it. Children were also beaten with
bobbins and flogged with straps similar to those that drove the
machinery. Some adult operatives and overlookers did not look beyond
themselves for tools of abuse. They kicked children, struck them with
clenched fist, and yanked children's hair and ears.[46]

A punishment that the overlooker imposed on Ellen was of a very different
sort. One morning, after the workers returned from breakfast, the
overlooker tied iron weights to Ellen's back and made her walk back and forth
through the throstle room 'with a cap on her head and a stick in her hand',
according to the overlooker's nonchalant addition under the examiner's direct
questioning. Mary had earlier presented a more dramatic description of
Ellen's accoutrements; according to her, Ellen walked, bent forward, 'with a
bit of a Scotch cap, and a sword in her hand'. The overlooker said that
the weights tied to Ellen's back did not cause her pain: 'she laughed at them,
and made fun of the joke'. Mary, however, said that the weights seemed to
cause Ellen pain, and she said that at home Ellen cried and complained that her
shoulders ached.

A significant share of the audience for this punishment -- the other workers --
apparently had little sympathy for Ellen. They teased Ellen -- 'plucked'
-- as she went by, and she fell down fighting with them and hitting them with
the stick. Mary noted twice, without specific prompting from the examiner,
that the point of the punishment was to 'shame' Ellen. The overlooker and
Ellen herself also agreed that her walking through the mill with the weights on
her back was to 'expose' her to the other children. Thus to most of the
children in the room, Ellen was probably a bad girl rather than a heroic rebel.

Direct evidence provides only a small clue about the significance of gender in
the other children's reaction to Ellen. Three boys were punished for
running away, while there is no mention of girls, other than Ellen, running
away. Since the punishment for running away was public, the experience of
punishment for running away provided a dimension in which Ellen would have been
grouped with these boys in the eyes of others in the mill. This situation
may have provided a basis for a particular hostility of girls toward Ellen.

To understand the other children's reaction, the nature of Ellen’s punishment
needs to be carefully considered. The examiner concluded that the
weighting of Ellen was an 'ignorant, stupid device of [the overlooker's] to
cure the girl of running away, but not cruelly intended'. Others presented a different picture. A
Manchester spinner linked Ellen's punishment to slavery, and Richard Oastler, a
fiery Tory opponent of child labor, compared the punishment of Ellen to the
Russians making the Poles carry iron weights in their exile to Siberia.
These statements were reported in Manchester, Bolton, and London
newspapers, and in fact motivated the special examination. Oastler
apparently was referring to events after the unsuccessful Polish revolt against
their Russian rulers in 1831. He may have been drawing from the
widely-read poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, a leading Polish poet, who offered the
following image of the Poles' exile:

Small boys, wasted and worn, all with their heads
shaved, with chains on their legs. The youngest, a child of ten years
old, complained, poor child! that he could not lift his chain, and he
showed his bare, bleeding leg. The head of the police came up, and looked
at the chain: 'Ten pounds. It agrees with the prescribed weight'.[47]

Ellen's punishment, however, meant more than simply an example of cruelty,
brutality, and inhumanity. An account
of a parish apprentice's life included an incident of weights being tied to a
boy's body. This weighting was done as a malicious 'sport' in the
context of an array of other sadistic tortures.[48] In contrast, tying weights to Ellen's back and having her walk
around the room with a cap on her head and a stick in her hand has a theatrical
dimension. The overlooker had fastened weights to a boy's leg and made
the boy walk around the room dragging the weight. Why was there the extra
embellishment for Ellen?

Consider the cap that the overlooker placed on Ellen's head. A cap known
as the 'cap of liberty' was an important prop in working class demonstrations
in the early nineteenth century.[49] While liberty was regularly portrayed in the
eighteenth century as a woman wearing a cap and holding a spear, in working
class protests in Lancashire in the early nineteenth century the cap of liberty
was often held up on a stick rather than worn on the head.[50] Mary described the cap that Ellen wore as 'a bit of a Scotch
cap'. She probably was referring to a flat-top cap also known as a Tam
O'Shanter, after a famous character who wore such a cap in a cherished poem of
Robert Burns.[51] Something resembling a flat, floppy cap with a tight head band
probably could have been created with rags lying around the
factory. However, the cap of liberty was conical -- less 'Scottish'
and perhaps harder to make.[52] These physical details suggest that the cap
that the overlooker placed on Ellen's head did not resemble a cap of liberty.

At an interpretive level, putting weights on Ellen's back and a cap of
liberty on her head would seem to be mocking working class political
aspirations. One might not expect such an attack from an overlooker from
the working class. Moreover, the display of caps of liberty died down in
the late 1820s, while Ellen's punishment occurred in 1833.[53] These points further indicate that the cap put on Ellen's head
was probably not an allusion to a cap of liberty.

The mines around Wigan provide a more plausible referent for a weighted girl
with a cap and a stick. There at least until 1842 women and girls worked
underground, pulling sleds of coal to the surface.[54] Figure 2 shows an example of a
female doing this kind of work.[55] The weights on Ellen's back were 'tied by two
bands over her shoulders and across the waist', exactly like the harnesses that
were used to pull coal sleds. More significantly, the 'Scotch cap' that
the overlooker put on Ellen was probably like the caps that the females in the
mines wore to protect their hair.[56] And at least female coal bearers in
Scotland sometimes used sticks to help make their way up the mine-shaft.[57] It is not difficult to believe that the overlooker, who had
worked in Wigan for more than six years prior to 1833, was familiar with how
females worked in the mines.[58] The best interpretation of Ellen's peculiar
punishment is that the overlooker was placing her in the position of a girl in
the mines.

Figure 2

Female work in the mines contrasted sharply with gender ideals emerging

in nineteenth century England. The work was dirty,
physically demanding, andwithout the rigid ordering of time and space found in
the factories. The workers often worked partly undressed, and the females
around Wigan, like the males, wore trousers.[59] The Children's Employment Commission
of 1842 sensationalized these facts. By the 1860s selling photographs of
coal-mining women in their work clothes was a brisk business in Wigan, and
gawkers at one major mine were apparently becoming so bothersome that it
forbade visitors.[60] While females who worked in the mines were not social outcasts,
there is good evidence that at least by the second half of the nineteenth
century factory girls felt superior to girls in the mines.[61]

The overlooker's choice of Ellen's punishment indicates attitudes of females in
the factories towards females who worked in the mines. In order to shame
Ellen, the overlooker needed to find a punishment that would resonate strongly
with her peers, the most important of which were probably the other girls in
the room. An autobiography of a female factory worker in early nineteenth
century Derbyshire provides additional evidence of how overlookers drew upon
gender ideals in formulating punishments.[62] After a horrendous account of
beatings which caused the deaths of two girls and caused another girl to go
insane, this worker noted:

They were in the habit of cutting off the
hair of all who were caught speaking to any of the lads. This headshaving
was dreadful punishment. We were more afraid of it than of any other, for
girls are proud of their hair, and we would have stood anything sooner than
have it cut off.[63]

The overlooker's punishment of Ellen also seems to be
a punishment directed toward Ellen as a girl. Thus it reveals her peers'
attitude toward females in the mines, an attitude that predated the cultural
uproar after the middle class 'discoveries' of 1842.[64]

The reaction of Ellen's peers to her punishment can be understood as an
alternative psychological development for dealing with the tensions between a
girl worker and her mother. The depth of these tensions was illustrated
in the relationship between Ellen and her mother. By asserting their superiority
to working girls in the mines, girls in the factories were asserting themselves
as more than just wage earners for their mothers. In contrast to Ellen's
rebellion against the factory regime, the 'good' girls responded to the
psychological tensions of wage earning for their mother by elaborating upon
their social position, which made them more than just wage earners.

While there is little additional information about Ellen's immediate peers,
working girls' desires for clothes were well recognized at the time.[65] When in 1795 an evangelical writer and social reformer rewrote
the story of the Lancashire collier girl, she included a passage warning
working girls against wasting their earnings on 'vanity of dress'.[66] As early as 1833 there are indications that women in the
factories were using make-up, and even females working in the coal mines often
wore necklaces and earrings.[67] One scholar has noted that a key component in
the expansion of demand during the Industrial Revolution was working women's
demands for fashionable clothing.[68] This scholar attributes women's
demands for clothes to 'social emulation' -- 'the mill girl who wanted to dress
like a duchess, and who, according to a host of contemporary observers, could
manage an increasingly close approximation of doing so'.[69] The argument here is that the mill girls' desire to dress like a
duchess may have had more to do with a displaced rebellion against an
wage-earning relationship to their mother than to the influence of the
duchess. The argument is not about the mother-daughter relationship in
some general, abstract psychoanalytic space, but rather about how gross
economic deprivation of a particular historical period was situated and worked
out in a central personal relationship.[70]

The repression and displacement of 'good' girls' reactions against the terms of
their existence as worker-children may also help to explain working-class
women's susceptibility to non-wage earning roles as mothers. Such a role
might would have resonated with a women's repressed resentment toward childhood
wage earning experience, and would have offered an alternative elaboration of
identity associated with a nurturing ideal of motherhood. The story of Mary and
Ellen also suggests that a mother's burden of enforcing the rules of work on
her daughter/wage earner was a source of considerable emotional strain in their
relationship. A male figure presented as an external source of law
offered a psychological outlet for this strain. Thus the experience of
child labor may have also contributed to females' reluctance to claim authority
within the family.

While recent literature has tended to downplay the importance of child labour
in early nineteenth century England,[71] the evidence does support the potential
significance of female child labour in affecting working class women's
reception of gender roles. The Industrial Revolution brought factory wage
labour, a form of labour that involved a radical shift in personal
relationships, to a significant proportion of young girls in Lancashire in the
early nineteenth century. The factory returns of 1835 indicate that 37%
of twelve year old girls in Lancashire were working in cotton, woollen, flax,
and silk factories that used power and that were large enough for the factory
inspectors' attention.[72] However, the Factory Act of 1833 forbade the employment of
children under nine and restricted the hours of children aged nine to twelve;
this created an incentive to decrease the number of young children employed and
to exaggerate the ages of those who were employed.[73] Redistributing the child workers
twelve years old and under in the 1835 returns in accordance with evidence on the
age distribution of child workers in 1833 implies that 24% of twelve year old
girls in Lancashire and 12% of ten year old girls worked in the factories that
the inspectors surveyed.[74] There is some evidence that about two decades
earlier the share of girls ten and under was even higher.[75] Moreover, the share of young girls working in factories was
higher in factory centres; in 1835 in Manchester and environs 58% of twelve
year old girls were working in factories.[76] Thus the experience of being a child
wage earner in a factory was a significant aspect of the experience of females
in Lancashire.

The social and geographic position of factory girls re-enforces the importance
of their psychology for understanding the development of gender roles.
Nineteenth century Lancashire was recognized as a locus of an emerging new
order, an order that put England at the center of world history. Working
class women in Lancashire in the 1830s and 1840s -- the women among whom
the experience of child labor in the factory was concentrated -- gained
cultural prominence from Lancashire's position as a symbol of a new economic
order. Moreover, factory girls had a basis for association with a large
number of women, an independent source of earnings, and a cultural arena in
which institutions were in a state of flux. Among women they were in a
relatively good position to provide leadership in defining women's roles.

This paper suggests that women's psychological response to the relational terms
of childhood wage earning reduced the potential of a rebellion against
domesticity.[77] It does not attempt to explore the psychological development of
male children. Nonetheless, it is worth briefly considering the issue as
a foil for the argument above. A boy who went to work in the factories in
1832 at age seven presented his relationship with his mother in his autobiography
as follows:

She too felt so happy when I came home on
the Saturday nights, and laid my small wages in her lap, that the tear would
sometimes start to her eye. Perhaps it was a tear of gratitude, or
sorrow, excited by wanting the protection of a husband and gaining the
premature assistance of a son.[78]

This account reads like a projection of the author's
relationship with his wife, or his idealization of it, back into his childhood.
The literature has well-documented men's interest in seeking to establish the
ideology of domesticity.[79] Men's interests as adults in relationship to
their wives provided men with a powerful way to rationalize their experiences
as child labourers, and hence contain the psychological strain of that
experience. For a woman who as a child had been a wage earner for her
mother, her possibilities as an adult wage earner did not provide such a
construct for resolving the psychological impact of that experience.

* * *

The social, economic, and political circumstances of early nineteenth century
England led to young girls working in factories under brutal conditions.
This paper has explored the psychological and relational dimensions of such
experience through an account of Ellen Hootton, a young girl-worker, her mother
Mary, and Ellen's nameless co-workers. Ellen was the object of an
incident of physical abuse that attracted public attention, and that attention
led to an official examination and a few obscure pages of testimony in the
parliamentary record. Drawing upon this text and more recognized history,
I have tried to put together a different set of stories -- the story of Mary
and Ellen's psychological and relational deformation under the circumstances of
their lives, the story of the other 'good' girls, and an account of how these
stories fit into the larger story of the nineteenth century.[80] The resulting history offers important insights into the effects
of deprivation and the development of gender.

From a guild-controlled metal manufacturing centre in the early eighteenth
century to a coal-and-cotton proletarian town at the end of the nineteenth, the
history of Wigan presents a fundamental story of the Industrial
Revolution. Next to that history, the history in this paper is more
recalcitrant, and the problem of interpretation is obvious in the construction
of the history as well as in the evidence itself. The examiner himself
noted that Mary, Ellen, and the overlooker '...spoke such broad dialect,
that I was often compelled to make them repeat their answers once or twice
before I could seize their meaning. Neither did they always understand me
at first, and several of their contradictions are to be attributed to
this'. One of his conclusions was, 'I hardly know what to say of the
mother', and as if to underscore his lack of understanding he went on to refer
to her as 'Mrs. Hootton'. This paper has reached not only for a more
satisfying interpretation but also for the historical dimension.

While the history in this paper is not propelled by well-recognized currents of
the story of industrialization, the general issues addressed here have an
important precedent. Over thirty years ago the psychological strains
associated with child labour were a central aspect of a major book that used
the Industrial Revolution to illustrate structural-functional analysis.[81] That book set out an elaborate theoretical apparatus and made
specific and detailed causal claims. While the book pulled together a
wide-ranging and subsequently influential body of empirical evidence, neither
its theoretical structure nor its specific claims have fared well with the
passage of time.[82] More significantly, the book has not stimulated any debate about
the psychological aspects of child labour. This issue may have been
forgotten at least in part because the theoretical structure of the book seems
to have precluded the sensitivity and empathy necessary to transform historical
objects into subjects.[83]

This paper has attempted to produce an affective account of some psychological
aspects of child labour and gender. It focused primarily on a narrow
historical site in order to secure a richly textured framework for an
unavoidably speculative endeavour. While the account in this paper is speculative,
it can be tested. The challenge of refuting this history is to produce a
more compelling story of the characters I have presented, or to find in other
historical sources characters who cry more deeply.[84]

* I am grateful for comments and
suggestions from Joan Galbi, David Landes, Alan MacFarlane, Emma Rothschild,
John Shaw, and Gareth Stedman Jones.

[1]Heidi Hartman, 'Capitalism,
patriarchy, and job segregation by sex', Signs,1:3 pt. 2 (Spring 1976),
136-69. Hartman in fact addresses the place of gender in female
psychology. But she does not address the issue in the context of nineteenth
century England, and the large literature influenced by her work has not
generally taken up the historical dimension of the psychology of gender.

[2]Sally Alexander, 'Women, Class and
Sexual Difference in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of
Feminist History', History Workshop, xviii (Spring 1984), 125-49.

[3]Dorothy Thompson, 'Women and
Nineteenth Century Radical Politics: a Lost Dimension', in J. Mitchell and A.
Oakley, (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth, 1976);
Catherine Hall, 'The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and working class
culture in early twentieth century England', in Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer, and
Janet Woollacott (eds), Popular Culture and Social Relations (Milton
Keynes, 1986), and Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement
(London,1991).

[4]A prominent example of a work that
gives women a distinctive place and language is Barbara Taylor, Eve and the
New Jerusalem (London, 1983).

[7]Marianna Valverde, 'Giving the Female
a Domestic Turn: The Social, Legal and Moral Regulation of Women's Work in the
British Cotton Mills, 1820-1850', Journal of Social History, 21:4 (June
1988), 625, 629. Note the contrast between women's voices heard here and
the above depiction of Chartist women's activities.

[8]David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge,
and Freedom (London, 1981). The near absence of women's autobiography is
attributed to subordination within the family depriving women of the
self-confidence necessary for self-assertion in autobiography. See ibid.,8.
One work that has made interesting use of women’s autobiographies over a larger
span of time and social position is Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A
History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991).

[9]This was a special examination in
response to sensational public reports about incidents of cruel punishment in
the mill in which Ellen Hootton worked. BPP, First Report of the
Central Board of His Majesty's Commissioners for inquiring into the Employment
of Children in Factories, 1833, XX, D.1 103-115. All the following
references to the story of the Hoottons are from this source.

[10]On the history of representations of
working class children in England, see Hugh Cunningham, The children of the
poor: representations of childhood since the seventeenth century (Oxford,
1992). For a review of nineteenth century child labour legislation, see
Frederick Hillersdon Keeling, Child Labour in the United Kingdom
(London, 1914). For a review of the development of schooling, see Neil J.
Smelser, Social paralysis and social change: British working-class education
in the nineteenth century (Berkeley, U.S.A., 1991), especially Chapter 8.

[13]The number of colliers at two
collieries in the Wigan area grew from about 10 colliers per colliery in 1780
to about 40 each in 1815, and the number of hewers recorded in land tax
assessments increased fivefold between 1782 and 1799. See Anderson, op.
cit., 123, and Langton, op. cit., 194.

[20]Mary noted that Ellen's father was a
'weaver by trade'. This suggests that he was no longer weaving, a further
indication of weavers' difficulties in Wigan. As a woman, Mary's
opportunities for market work outside of weaving were more limited than her
husband's.

[23]According to Ellen her age was nine;
when asked how old she is, she said, 'I shall be ten the 4'th of August'.
Her mother, on the other hand, said, 'She is going of eleven; will be
eleven next August'. I tend to find Ellen's testimony more convincing.
See above.

[24]The factory, which used throstles for
spinning, turned out threads (6-20 counts) that were coarser than threads
typically produced on that kind of machinery at that time. Coarser
threads were less valued. See Isaac Cohen, American Management and
British Labor (Westport, 1990), 34-5. Moreover, the factory employed
70 workers and was powered by a 14 horsepower steam engine. The size of
the factory was smaller and the level of horsepower per worker lower than in
other coarse spinning factories in Wigan. See BPP, Factory Inspectors'
Reports, December 1841,1842, XII, 41. The factory was built before
1823, probably a considerable amount of time before. See First Report,
op. cit., D.1 283.

[27] Mary said that Ellen ran away
'many times'. When twenty times was suggested she said it was less than
that; when ten times was suggested she said, 'I dare say it were ten'.
She also indicated that the overlooker had punished Ellen in a distinctive way
more than five times. The overlooker, on the other hand, said that Ellen
ran away three or four times, and that he had punished her two or three times.

[28]In early nineteenth century England,
the father had the right to custody of his child. See Ivy Pinchbeck and
Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, 2 vols. (London, 1973), i,
362-76. The fact that Mary received custody of Ellen suggests that she
wanted Ellen.

[29]Michael Anderson, Family
Structures in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), 76-8,
presents additional evidence that working class parents loved their children
despite difficult circumstances. Linda Pollack, in Forgotten children:
parent-child relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983), and A
lasting relationship: parents and children over three centuries (London,
1987), presents a forceful critique of the 'invention of childhood' thesis and
extensive documentation that middle class parents did love and care for their
children.

[31]Vincent hedges the above description,
noting, '...where the family economy proved incapable of providing its
dependent members with security and training...the child came to see his
earnings as a measure...of his exploitation as an individual worker in the
market'. He asserts that weak 'support functions' of the family economy
led to children's feelings of isolation and vulnerability, and that factories
emptied child labor 'of what positive value it had possessed'. ibid,
84-6. He provides little evidence to support these
assertions. Children's work in the factories was a significant source of
training, and in general working class families did not have much
security. On security see ibid., 68-9, and Anderson, op. cit.,
29-32; on the training of children in factories see Douglas Galbi, 'Child Labor
in the Early English Factories', paper presented at the American Economic
Association Conference (Boston, 1994). Moreover, exploited child laborers
did not perceive themselves as isolated individuals. See below.

[33]For the legal position of mothers,
see Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, 362-76.
Anderson argues that mothers had closer emotional bonds to their children than
did fathers. See Anderson, op. cit., 77.

[34]My reading of the factory reports was
limited to those from Lancashire. The analysis of mid-nineteenth century
worker-girls’ stories in Carolyn Steedman, The Tidy House (London,
1982), 114-127, also suggests that the primary significance of girls' work was
in the context of their relationship with their mother.

[43]ibid., 135-6. According
to the girl, 'I ain't got no father, he's a father in law. No, mother
ain't married again -- he's a father in law....He grinds scissors and he's very
good to me. No; I don't mean by that he says kind things to me for he
hardly ever speaks'. Quoted in loc. cit. from Henry Mayhew, London
Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (London, 1851), i, 151-2.

[44]For an analysis and critiques of how
mothers shape their children, see Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of
Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, 1978),
Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York, 1976), and
Alice Miller, The drama of being a child and the search for the true self
(London, 1987). As Chodorow notes (44), it is a mistake to assume that
psychic structures are established only up to age five. Girls in
particular tend to maintain elements of the primary relationship with their mother
well past infancy. Thus psychoanalytic theory does not imply the
psychological insignificance of child labor.

[45]In a survey of Lancashire cotton
mills in 1833, among workers under 18 in throstle spinning (the kind of
spinning that took place in the factory considered here) there were 36% more
girls than boys. Factories Inquiry Sup. Rep., op. cit.,
XIX, D.1, Supplement B.

[48]See John Brown, A Memoir of Robert
Blincoe (Manchester, 1832), 39-40.

[49]For a discussion and analysis of the
cap of liberty, see James Epstein, 'Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic
Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England', cxxii, Past
& Present (Feb. 1989), 75-118.

[51]For depictions of the cap, see 'Tam
O'Shanter 'getting fou and unco happy', painting by John Burnet (1784-1868),
reproduced in James Barke (ed.), Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
(London, 1955), 416. See also the engravings of Ayr, Market Cross, and of
Shanter Farm and Bay, Carrick, from paintings of David Octavius Hill
(1802-1870), an artist known for his accurate and unsentimental depictions, and
who was an early experimenter with the calotype, a negative-based photographic
process. The engravings are reproduced in In the Land O' Burns
(Glasgow, 1981), 69,71. That the cap was a common piece of Scottish
working class dress in the early nineteenth century is further suggested by its
appearance in the portrait 'John Cowper, an Edinburgh Beggar, 1808' attrib. to
William Lizars, reproduced in Duncan Macmillan, Scottish Art 1460-1990
(Edinburgh, 1990), 181.

[58]A cotton mill and a coal mine were
often part of a single landowner's estate. See ibid., 106, and The
History of the British Coal Industry, 4 vols., Michael W. Flinn, xx, 1700-1830:
The Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1984) 52. The owner of the cotton
mill in which Ellen worked was William Eccles. See BPP, Factories
Inquiry Commission, Part II, 1834, XX, D.1 283. In 1841 a Mr. Eccles
was an owner, with Mr. Case, of the Douglass Bank mine in Wigan. See Mines,
op. cit., 1842 (382), XVII, 194. Moreover, in 1845 Richard Eccles,
a master cotton spinner in Wigan, leased part of his Walthew House Estate to a
coal mine owner who wanted to use the Clarke wagon road, part of which ran over
Mr. Eccles' land. The Clarke wagon road was in 1812 the path of the
'Yorkshire Horse', one of the first steam locomotives in England. This
engine, which must have been an impressive sight, apparently continued
operating up to the 1830's. See Anderson, op. cit., 11-117,
and Townley, Smith, and Peden, op. cit., 58-60. I suspect that the
reference to Richard Eccles is a mistake, and that it was in fact William
Eccles. The important point is that coal mining and cotton spinning had
significant visible connections.

[68]Neil McKendrick, 'Home Demand and
economic growth: a new view of the role of women and children in the industrial
revolution', in Neil McKendrick, (ed.), Historical Perspective on English
Thought and Society in honor of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974).

[69]ibid., 198, 209. For a
recent contribution, explicitly including women and children, to the
long-standing debate about trends in the standard of living in
nineteenth-century England, see Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, 'Old
questions, new data and alternative perspectives: family living standards in
the industrial revolution', Journal of Economic History, lxx (Dec.
1992), 849-880.

[70]See Steedman, op. cit.,
121. Gagnier, op. cit., 58, has also noted that subjectivity has
‘...profound vulnerability to the deprivations of the body’.

[72]This figure offers a very different
perspective from ibid., 141, which shows that only 1.4% of girls aged
five to nine years were employed in Lancashire in 1851. The age of girls
under consideration is a key issue, especially given the Factory Act of
1833. See below. The number of girls employed, 6158, is calculated
from BPP, Factory Inspectors' Reports, 1835, XLV, 84. To estimate
the number of twelve year old girls in Lancashire in 1835, I adjusted the
proportion of girls aged 10-14 in the female population in Lancashire in 1851
using Wrigley and Schofield's estimates of the change between 1831 and 1851 in
share of the population aged 5-14, and applied this proportion to a population
estimate for Lancashire in 1835 interpolated from the Census figures for 1831 and
1841. Assuming that the share of twelve year old girls among girls 10-14
was the same in 1835 as in 1851, I then used Census data for the latter figure
to arrive at the final estimate. See BPP, Census of 1851, 1852,
LXXXVIII, Part I, Table 6 clix, Table II cxciv, 1852-3 LXXXVI, 133, and E.A.
Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871
(London, 1981) Table A3.1, 529.

[73]The restrictions were phased in over
time. When the above survey took place the employment of 12 year olds was
not restricted. For details of the legislation and enforcement efforts,
see Thomas, op. cit., 61-71, 115-45.

[75]The age and experience of females in
factory rosters from 1818 and 1819 indicate that 50% of the females started
work at 10 years of age or younger. See Douglas Galbi, 'The Perpetuation
of Gender in the Early English Cotton Mills', Working Paper (Centre for
History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge) Table 5.

[76]Calculated as above for Lancashire,
using Census, op. cit., 1852, LXXXVII-Part I, Table V, cxcix, and
1852-3, LXXXVI, 135. The population figure for Manchester and environs
encompasses Manchester, Salford, and Chorlton. The later two were
important factory areas that apparently were included under Manchester in the
factory survey.

[77]It is worth noting that Owenism,
which presented the most significant alternative vision to the ideology of domesticity,
proposed a radical restructuring of the relationship between parents and
children, and a very different form of child labor. See, for example,
Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints (Cambridge, 1989), 81.

[81]Neil Smelser, Social Change in the
Industrial Revolution (London, 1959). Smelser focuses on the role of
fathers and had very little to say about mothers.

[82]For an influential early critique,
see Michael Anderson, 'Sociological History and the Working-Class Family:
Smelser Revisited', Social History iii (Oct. 1976), 317-334.

[83]The development of writing about
women and gender has in some cases led to approaches quite similar to
Smelser's, although professing a very different theoretical orientation.
For a critical account of the historiography of women and gender see Carolyn
Steedman, 'Bimbos from hell', Social History 19:1 (Jan. 1994), 57-67.

[84]This paper is in part a response to
recent debates about historiographic methodology, social history, popular
history, and post-modernism. See the debate about social history and its
discontents: Social History, xvii, 2 (May 1992), 167-88; ibid.,
xviii, 1 (Jan. 1993), 1-16, 81-5; ibid., xviii (May '93), 219-33; ibid.,
xix, 1 (Jan. 1994), 81-97; the debate on history and post-modernism: Past
& Present, cxxxi (May 1991), 217-8; ibid., cxxxiii (Nov. 1991),
204-13; ibid., cxxxv (May 1992), 189-208; and the debate on the dilemma
of popular history: Past & Present, cxxxii (Aug. 1991), 130-49; ibid.,
cxli (Nov. 1993), 207-14, 215-19. These debates, it seems to me, become
less interesting as they drift farther from the historical problems and texts
at hand.